Following professional advice, the data presented is of the crimes most relevant to students: robbery, burglary, and violence and sexual crimes. The universities are ranked on the combined rate of all three crimes occurring in the past 12 months in areas where students live during term time.

The official data for crime specifically against students isn’t available – these figures are based on all the victims in the vicinity, not just students.

This data aims to helps students with their university decision process when their prospective universities can’t provide the relevant information.

These statistics are derived from data produced by police.uk, Ordnance Survey and the Office for National Statistics, and used under Open Government Licence v3. Student term-time accommodation data, HESA 2017–18

The ranking is based on the relative levels of crimes of relevance to students – it doesn’t record crimes where students are themselves involved

We calculated the annual reported incidents per thousand residents for the period May 2018–April 2019 by each ward or electoral division in England and Wales – for each institution, these crime rates were then combined using a weighting derived from the proportion of the institution's students who lived in each ward

Where universities have multiple campuses, the figures relate to the aggregate for the institution – crime heat maps around universities can be found in the university profiles on the Living Here tab

Because they’re based on resident populations and take no account of short-stay visitors and commuters, the figures may over-represent crime levels – however, this reporting problem is a common issue and the relative crime rates remain valid

Comparable data for Scotland and Northern Ireland isn’t available – rankings for cities and towns in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales with two or more universities are available